Close to Porta Nolana – one of the ancient entrances to the city of Naples – lies the Circumvesuviana Terminal railway line. It can be considered one of the masterpieces by Giulio De Luca, who helped define the city’s approach to architectural modernity. This contribution proposes a critical investigation of the Terminal, as a paradigmatic case in which infrastructural design transcends its functional scope and becomes a spatial device capable of structuring urban fluxes. Through a comparative analysis of different urban redevelopment cases, it emerges that the Terminal represents one of the first propulsive interventions for public space, in which architecture moves away from the static nature of Modernism and becomes a vector force, dynamic and anticipatory of social or territorial changes and has “the ability to carve out its own form in such a way that it is, above all, plastically receptive to all kinds of exchange”1 .This intervention is characterized by a different relationship with public space by juxtaposing, blending, or intersecting the urban fabric. This results in an hybrid condition of public space, where different flows of people, vehicles, information, and history intersect. In this sense, the terminal is a synthesis of an interpretation of the context peculiarities, its generative geometries, scale and proportions make it akin to an “urban insertion alien to inhibitions and compromises, indeed lucidly polemical and aggressive”2, offering a blueprint for how infrastructural architecture can generate different degrees of publicness between different scales of the city.
- See Calderoni, A. (2002). Stazione Porta Nolana am Porta Nolana in Neapel. Gebundenes Monument: Bahnhof von Giulio De Luca, 1972–75, Bauwelt 18. ↩︎
- de Solà-Morales, I. (Ed.). (2002). La forma de la moción. Flujos, in Id., Territorios, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, p. 90. ↩︎
- Zevi, B. (1978). Si scende in diagonale., Cronache di architettura 20, Laterza, Roma-Bari. ↩︎
Bibliography
- Bertoli B. (2013). Giulio De Luca. 1912-2004 Opere e progetti. Napoli: CLEAN.
- de Solà-Morales, M. (2008). A Matter of Things. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili.
- de Solà-Morales, I. (2002). Territorios. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili.
